ggsict.org

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Last.fm’s open API has given rise to hundreds of user-created applications, plug-ins, web tools, mash-ups and widgets. No other music site offers more tools or more features to help users connect with each other and the music they love.

Digital music site Last.fm is like Pandora on steroids. The site allows devoted music fans from around the world to compare tastes, stream music from their favorite artists, stay up to date on local shows, download free MP3s, and create their own custom radio stations.

How to do more with Last.fm–screenshots

Unfortunately, the deep features that makes Last.fm so appealing to hardcore music nerds, can also make the site a little intimidating to first-timers and casual listeners. Like a freshman dance, folks will often just find one comfortable corner of Last.fm and lose sight of everything else going on around them.

If you’re interested in breaking out of your Last.fm rut, I’ve put together a quick video guide and slideshow, illustrating some ways to take your experience further.

Disclosure: Last.fm is a property of CNET parent company CBS.

Designed for the PC and Mac, the Sims 3 Expansion Pack will hit store shelves the week of November 16, says EA. A portable version for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch will be out early next year.

The Sims 3

Sims players will soon be able to journey to countries such as China and Egypt, search for hidden treasures, and meet fellow Sims along the way.

Electronic Arts announced Monday that it’s developing the first expansion pack for its popular Sims 3 game. The new pack, Sims 3 World Adventures, will take players on a journey to real-world locales, says EA, from ancient tombs in Egypt to romantic getaways in France. While trekking across the globe, players can take on new challenges, develop different skills, and interact with other Sims.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

“We’re thrilled with the global success of The Sims 3 over these last few months and are looking forward to expanding on the gameplay experience with one of the most robust expansion packs to The Sims yet,” said Scott Evans, General Manager of The Sims at EA.

Since its release in early June, Sims 3 has been a hot product. The game sold 1.9 million copies in its first week alone, making it EA’s best PC game launch ever.

The approach also relies on tying together different technologies, some of which are relatively immature in terms of commercial deployment. Making familiar biofuel processes cost effective is hard enough: after years of research and pilot projects, ethanol from wood chips or grasses still isn’t produced at commercial scale.

(Credit:
Idaho National Laboratory)

Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have been working for the past year and a half on a process to convert biomass, such straw or crop residue, into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than existing cellulosic ethanol technologies.

An often-quoted Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy study (click for PDF) estimated that the U.S. produces enough biomass to meet 30 percent of the country’s liquid fuel. INL researchers say the higher productivity of its technology would cover more like 60 percent, nearly as much as the oil that the U.S. imports.

INL researchers imagine that a single location to collect biomass, run the gasifier and the electrolyzer. Fuel could be refined on site or shipped to existing facilities. The ash from the gasifier would contain many soil nutrients, such as potassium, that could be redistributed onto the fields that the biomass was collected from.

A scarce resource for fuel?

Innovation in integration

Hawkes coined the term bio-syntrolysis to represent the combination of technologies researchers have been working with. To make a liquid fuel, they are using biomass to make a synthetic fuel via electrolysis of water.

Research on nuclear energy and hydrogen has yielded what backers say is a technology that could replace U.S. oil imports with biofuels made from agricultural by-products.

There are some commercially available biomass gasifiers and a few facilities turning synthesis gas into liquid fuel using coal as a feedstock. But coal-to-liquids has a high carbon footprint, even compared with gasoline, said Hawkes. If a renewable or carbon-free source, such as hydro power, can be used through bio-syntrolysis, the resulting fuel would have very low emissions, he said.

To reduce carbon emissions significantly over other biomass-to-liquid processes, the INL technology requires a lot of carbon-free electricity–1,000 megawatts of electricity would yield enough 25,000 barrels of fuel a day, enough for almost one million people, according to INL models. A full-size nuclear reactor could produce 1,000 megawatts, but even large-scale wind farms or solar plants are substantially smaller.

Storing hydrogen on plants

So far, INL researchers have done experiments using available commercial products and they have modeled the overall efficiency on computer. To build a high-temperature electrolyzer, they have purchased commercial fuels cells and modified them to work in reverse, so they produce hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.

Although it’s a compelling vision, there are a number of technical hurdles to making bio-syntrolysis commercially viable and environmentally beneficial.

Rather than one single development, the technology–named bio-syntrolysis–ties together multiple processes, but it has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, at is starting point. When combined with a carbon-free electricity source, the approach could deliver a carbon-neutral biofuel, according to models done at INL which has done research for decades in nuclear energy.

The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods, said research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel, he said.

Why not simply use the hydrogen from the electrolyzer in fuel-cell vehicles? Hawkes and Herring said that the technical limits on hydrogen right now make this an approach that could be deployed without having to wait for technical breakthroughs in hydrogen vehicles.

The jump from hydrogen research to biofuels happened when Hawkes thought to make biomass the heat source for INL’s high-temperature electrolysis, rather than the heat from a nuclear reactor. By making that switch, the electrolyzer can operate on biomass and electricity alone, rather than rely on a nuclear reactor.

“We feel each that each one of these technologies is individually proven but nobody has ever taken them and hooked them together to make one process,” said Hawkes.

“That means if you gather up a kilogram of biomass from a field, you’re going to get two and half times the liquid fuel from bio-syntrolysis than you would from cellulosic ethanol. If biomass is a precious commodity, this way you’ll get more out of it,” Hawkes said.

“There is no need for any great discovery but there is a need for development of materials and electrolyzers and just the will the put all the different sources together,” said Steve Herring, a research fellow at Idaho National Labs.

“It’s our observation that the best way to store hydrogen is to hook it onto a carbon atom from biomass now and make it a hydrocarbon fuel,” said Hawkes.

By contrast, if the hydrogen was used to make hydrocarbon fuels, they could be distributed through the existing channels and be used with existing autos, including hybrid-electric vehicles.

Bio-syntrolysis is one of a dizzying number of technologies being developed with the hopes of replacing gasoline, although none have successfully been done at scale. Researchers at INL recognize there remain technical barriers, but its recent computer models show that the technique has better potential than today’s biofuel processes.

“This is the only process available that will give us all the liquid fuel we currently need that’s carbon neutral with the all the biomass that’s available,” he said.

A schematic of how carbon-neutral biofuel can be produced using a combination of existing technologies.

Here’s how it would work: a high-temperature electrolyzer would split steam into oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen would be fed to a biomass gasifier, a machine that heats agriculture waste at high temperatures to produce synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, along with the hydrogen from the electrolyzer, would be fed to a refiner to make liquid fuels that could replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

The biggest technology breakthrough in this design is the high-temperature electrolysis, which originally came from a program to study how nuclear reactors could be used to make hydrogen. But hydrogen-powered vehicles face a number of obstacles, including on-board storage and the infrastructure to cleanly produce and to distribute hydrogen.

The projected cost of the fuel would be $2.50 a gallon to produce, which is not cheaper than today’s gasoline. But the primary advantage is the fuel is domestically sourced, low-carbon, and available at a predictable price, Herring said. One of the rationales for the technology is that biomass to make fuel will become a scarce commodity, making techniques that can squeeze more energy from existing crops more compelling.

(Credit:
Idaho National Laboratory)

In order to avoid serving up two versions of a paid document, such as a preview and full version, Docstoc has updated its Adobe Flash-based viewer to limit viewing to several pages of a document. This lets potential buyers take a look before they buy, just as Amazon and competitor Scribd do.

Documents purchased through Docstoc can be viewed on the Web or on portable devices like the Kindle and the iPhone. Rather than selling books, Docstoc is specializing in ready-made forms, presentations, and technical documents–what the company is calling “professional utility documents.” However, there are some publishers in Docstoc’s store, like WriteMyEssay.com, that cover topics outside of business. Nazar says that the store may continue to expand into other areas, but that it will keep “selectively picking the best, high-quality partners” from those that apply to be included in the store.

Competitor Scribd launched a similar offering back in May with a guaranteed 80 percent revenue share to publishers and pricing limits up to $5,000 per title. Docstoc is launching with its aforementioned sliding scale of revenue sharing, which I’m told has no limit on maximum pricing. It will also continue to offer its advertising service, which places Google Adsense ads next to documents that are offered for free.

As part of the deal, publishers get “a majority” of the revenue, although actual figures are based on a sliding scale and depend on who they are and how Docstoc is promoting them.

Online document host Docstoc on Wednesday is opening up an online store for publishers to sell their wares. The company is acting both as the host and the payment platform, as well as providing the viewing technology for the documents.

(Credit:
Docstoc)

As for payments, Docstoc is letting users pay via PayPal, Google Checkout, or with a credit card. There’s also a money-back guarantee policy that lets users get a refund if they’re dissatisfied. The policy gives users a week to make a return, with up to five returns a year. To keep any abuse from happening, the company is also tracking users’ IP addresses, to make sure they’re not just opening up new accounts and making returns beyond the five-time limit, although Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar told me he doesn’t anticipate too heavy a return rate, since the new viewer shows a multipage preview.

Browsing documents for sale is just like browsing Docstoc's free, hosted documents, except that you can only view a preview until you pay for a content license.

Spurs' full name is Tottenham Hotspur. The club is not in a pretty part of London.

“Sunderland are not the problem in the slightest. Do I wanna go Hull City? NO. Do I wanna go Stoke? NO. Do I wanna go Sunderland? YES. So stop f****** around Levy,” he tweeted.

You will be stunned that Levy was not exactly amused by Bent’s self-expression. He fined the player two weeks’ salary–around $130,000–despite Bent offering a sidewalk-licking apology.

Suddenly, rumors began to swirl that Levy might be trying to transfer Bent’s skills to a club other than Sunderland.

You see, Bent was hell-keen on leaving his club, Spurs. And in the less than free market that is English soccer, he needed to wait for the club to negotiate a transfer fee with another club, Sunderland.

So, like many a modern man, he reached for an electronic device to give full flavor to his feelings.

(Credit: CC Inkiboo/Flickr)

This was more than the player’s head could take. So his fingers did some talking for him.

I do think British Prime Minister Gordon Brown should get involved in this one.

The only problem was that he did it on Twitter.

Darren Bent is known for his creative ways of missing scoring opportunities.

Perhaps the saddest part of this whole painful affair is that Bent’s Twitter page–with the delightful moniker db10thetruth (10 was Bent’s shirt number)–has been retired.

Twitter needs all of the honest and famous tweeters it can have. If their sincerity is to be suppressed by the malicious hand of corporate culture, what will remain of our new-found, glorious microblogging society?

“Seriously getting pissed off now. Why can’t anything be simple. It’s so frustrating hanging round,” he tweeted, according to the Mirror newspaper.

Levy has also still not expedited his transfer to Sunderland.

So it is perhaps surprising that he managed to hit home with some telling verbal strikes against his club’s chairman, Daniel Levy.

Clearwire said in August that it would spend between $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion in 2009 to expand its network. Deutsche Telekom could provide more funding for this endeavor in exchange for access to the network, Bloomberg reports.

Last week, rumors resurfaced that Deutsche Telekom was looking to buy Sprint Nextel. Sprint is the third-largest wireless operator in the U.S. and has been struggling the last few years to retain customers. The idea behind a potential buyout of Sprint is that it would give Deutsche Telekom more subscribers, which could help it compete more aggressively against the two largest wireless carriers in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

German phone giant Deutsche Telekom is looking to jump into the 4G wireless market in the U.S. through partnerships with U.S.-based service providers, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

But if 4G access is what Deutsche Telekom really wants, then a partnership with Clearwire makes sense. Sprint owns about 51 percent in Clearwire. Last year, the companies created a joint venture combining assets from both companies. Clearwire, which has already begun building its nationwide 4G wireless network, is using 2.5 GHz spectrum that is owned by Sprint.

Partnerships with Clearwire and MetroPCS would cost the German phone company much less than purchasing Sprint outright, and it would be a lot easier than trying to digest another wireless provider.

A deal with MetroPCS, which sells prepaid wireless service, could help Deutsche Telekom get access to a 4G wireless network that will use a more widely adopted technology called LTE or Long-Term Evolution. MetroPCS acquired spectrum in the 700 MHz wireless auction, and it has said that it plans to build a 4G network using LTE starting in 2010. Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest mobile operator, which also acquired spectrum in the same 700 MHz auction, is also building a 4G wireless network using LTE.

Clearwire has already made similar deals with other investors. Last year, cable companies Comcast and Time Warner Cable were among investors that provided the company with $3.2 billion in funding. Google and Intel have also invested in Clearwire.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Deutsche Telekom is looking to beef up its presence in the U.S. wireless market by investing in Clearwire, a company that is building a 4G wireless network using a technology called WiMax. Sources also told Bloomberg that Deutsche Telekom is also talking to Metro PCS, which recently acquired spectrum to build its 4G wireless network.

Deutsche Telekom already owns T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest wireless carrier in the U.S. But the carrier’s growth has remained flat for several quarters. And the company hasn’t yet announced plans for its next-generation network.

As the Clearwire network comes online, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have each announced they will offer mobile wireless broadband service using the Clearwire network in areas where they offer cable service.

But now it looks like the German telecom giant could be looking for a more cost-effective way to increase its presence in the U.S. market.

Buying Sprint Nextel would likely become an integration nightmare for Deutsche Telekom. Sprint Nextel is already the product of what many consider one of the worst telecom mergers ever. Sprint bought Nextel in 2005 for $35 billion. And for the past four years, the company has struggled to integrate two different wireless networks. Sprint’s network operates using a technology called CDMA, while Nextel uses a technology called I-DEN. T-Mobile USA uses GSM, which would introduce a third type of technology into the mix.

Comparing it to the other companies involved in the showdown, Acer received a C-; ASUS (B-); Dell (C-); Fujitsu (B-); Gateway (B-); HP (C-); Lenovo (B+); Sony (B+); and Toshiba got a “B.”

Laptop magazine’s Tech Support Showdown 2009 rates 10 computer companies’ tech support, with Apple coming out the overall winner. Apple’s overall grade for 2009 was an “A,” scoring an “A” for both phone and Web support.

Apple also received “A” ratings in 2007 and 2008 from the magazine for its tech support.

“Virtually no computer vendor–or retailer, for that matter–is immune from the wrath of users who have become intimately familiar with the ‘Blue Screen of Death,’ and other PC foibles,” the magazine said in its introduction to the tests. “But, it’s how manufacturers handle their customers’ hardware and software problems that ultimately determine their true reliability, and, you would think, future sales.”

Apple’s support performance over the last few years, coupled with the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, have propelled Apple’s Mac sales. In its 2009 fiscal third quarter, Apple reported selling 2.6 million Macs, up 4 percent from the year ago quarter.

“Apple has consistently offered some of the best Web and phone support of any computer vendor, and this year was no different,” the magazine said in evaluating Apple. “Its Web site is brimming with well-ordered FAQs, query-based search, and PDF manuals, the latter of which quickly answered our external monitor question.”

If a top-notch customer support program is high on your list of features when buying a new computer, you should be looking at a Mac, according to a new ranking.

Microsoft and Intel declined to say just how much overall battery life improvement Windows 7 might offer as compared to Vista, saying there are too many factors that can influence such results.

“I don’t want to state a number,” Panabaker said at the event, which was organized by Intel and Microsoft.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The move comes as Microsoft gears up for the October 22 launch of Windows 7.

CNET News’ Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Playing a DVD, a Windows Vista Ultimate system, left showed an estimated battery life of 4.14 hours, but the Windows 7 Ultimate system on the right showed 5.5 hours.

“We’re achieving a very significant amount of battery savings,” said Microsoft principal program manager Ruston Panabaker.

SAN FRANCISCO–Upgrading a newer machine from Windows Vista to Windows 7 might mean that you get to see the last few minutes of that DVD on a long flight.

At a demo on Tuesday, Microsoft showed two identical laptops playing the same DVD, with the Windows 7-equipped notebook getting 20 percent better battery life than one running Windows Vista. In general, users can expect newer systems running Windows 7 to offer 10 percent to 20 percent better battery improvement when watching a DVD.

Microsoft and Intel showed these power consumption improvements results for a system running Windows 7, left, and Vista. The left chart shows consumption while the system was idle; at right, when playing a DVD.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing for Microsoft is the fact that Intel itself is willing to use Windows 7 within its own corporate walls. The chipmaker has been an XP-only shop throughout Vista’s life. In an interview here, Intel VP Stephen Smith said that Intel had some internal applications that weren’t Vista-compatible and the benefits of moving to Vista didn’t justify the costs.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

By contrast, Smith said several hundred people inside Intel are already running Windows 7 on their corporate machines.

The event was designed to outline the joint work that the two halves of Wintel have been doing to make Windows 7 perform better in areas such as virtualization, power management, and performance.

On the performance side, Microsoft and Intel showed a reference system that can boot up in 11 seconds, although again real-world performance is likely to vary a lot based on what’s inside the PC and how well tuned it is. For instance, the system shown Tuesday had a solid-state drive and other high-performance componets.

Ruston Panabaker, Microsoft's principal program manager of strategic silicon partnering, shows how later builds of Windows 7 were able to let the processor enter low-power states for longer periods of time, saving more power.

Tip: If iTunes is still showing version 2.5 on your desktop, click the “Facebook” breadcrumb on the page’s top navigation. Refreshing the Web page won’t necessarily do the trick. On the iPhone, delete the Facebook application and download it anew from the App Store on your phone. Even if the app page does not say it’s version 3.0, the new version should install.

Facebook has also poured energy into how it deals with friends. You’re now able to call or text friends from the interface, which brings Facebook’s social connectivity into the real world. You can see friends of friends and mutual friends from the app, too, as well as the Pages you subscribe to. If you’re trying to locate a friend from within a page, Facebook has thought of that too, by equipping the page with search. To top it off, you can subscribe to Pages from the phone, not merely view them passively.

There are more additions besides, but we thought we would start you off with a little taste and some first impressions. To see the full list, visit the Facebook page on iTunes.

Photos received a lot of attention in this update. You’ll now be able to zoom into photos, create albums and delete them, as well as upload and delete photos and photo tags, all from the Facebook interface. In addition, you can upload a new profile picture.

How to see version 3.0 in iTunes.

Those who use Facebook on the iPhone frequently will notice that quite a few of these actions are brand new, like viewing events and submitting an RSVP from your phone. You’ll also be able to view friends’ birthdays and upload photos to any album. Anyone sporting an iPhone 3GS gets the added bonus of uploading video.

Facebook for iPhone opens on your news feed as usual, but the upper left corner now sports a tiny grid icon that serves as the main organizing feature for this new build. Click it to see a screen equipped with a search bar on top, a notification alert area on the bottom, and a grid of nine activities you can perform in the middle. These include the news feed, your profile details, your message in-box, Facebook chat, friend requests, events, photo albums, and notes.

The third major edition of Facebook for iPhone has just crept into the iTunes App Store. It’s a huge update, with numerous advanced features that make Facebook more interactive than before and which bring the app as close to the desktop experience as it’s ever been.

Facebook 3.0 introduces new navigation, notifications, events, and more.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

So far, this app impresses, but we’ll keep you up to date on any quibbles we develop as we spend more time with this it and really get to know both its strong points and its flaws. iPhone and iPod Touch users, what do you think?

The new built-in Web browser is one feature addition that some may miss at first, but which is ultimately one of the most practical and useful for keeping the Facebook experience on iPhone firmly within the Facebook app. Before this integration, clicking a link would kick you out of the app and open a Safari browser. You would have to restart Facebook to resume your place.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

REDMOND, Wash.–Microsoft said on Friday that it will charge $149 for the family pack version of Windows 7, which allows users to upgrade up to three PCs to the Home Premium edition of the operating system.

Microsoft also announced pricing for the Windows Anytime Upgrade option, which lets users move from one version of Windows 7 to another.

In the U.S. and 11 other countries, upgrade codes can be purchased at a store or online.

Among the other prices, the move from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional will cost $89.99, while going from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate will cost $139.99. Although that last move is pricey, it still represents a 12 percent drop in the cost of going from Windows Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate.

This post was updated at 3:33 p.m. PST with more information about supply.

Microsoft said that the move from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Home Premium will cost $79.99. That is one of the key upgrades Microsoft is hoping to sell by convincing Netbook owners that they really want more of the Windows features.

Microsoft noted in some of its communications that the family pack is available “while supplies last.” Given that Microsoft would seem to be in a position to make as many boxes as it wants, I pressed the software maker to understand how limited this offer will be. A company representative would only say that it is a new offer that Microsoft is testing and declined to elaborate on the time frame or the number of copies it was limited to.

Because the move involves only entering a new product code, Microsoft said the Anytime Upgrade in Windows 7 can be done in as little as 10 minutes. With Vista, the move also required the use of a special Anytime Upgrade disk.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The software maker had previously said it would offer the family pack, but had not said how much it would charge. (It actually inadvertently confirmed the family pack by referencing it in the licensing terms of a test version of Windows 7 that leaked onto the Internet.) The family pack covers those moving from XP or Vista to Windows 7.